THE
RIGHT MAN FOR THE JOB

A
few weeks ago, BEAST reporter and head coach Slidell Montgomery
called me in a panic. He was manic, barely understandable
on the phone. The right fake beard story will do that to a
professional humorist. "Did you fucking read the newspaper?"
he said. "They're going to put Kopp in a fake beard for the
lineup!"

Slidell
slowed down and explained the story, by now well-known to
most everybody in this city. Kopp was to be placed in a lineup
wearing a fake beard, fake mustache, and dyed hair to simulate
what police say his appearance was four years ago, before
he fled in anticipation of arrest for Dr. Barnett Slepian's
murder.

The
decision by Erie County judge Michael D'Amico was immediately
called "highly controversial" in the press for the predictable
reason that the defense, led by legendary attorney Paul Cambria,
considered the wholescale alteration of a suspect's appearance
for a lineup somewhat, er, prejudicial. After all, if you
follow the reasoning behind this kind of technique to its
logical end, you could conceivably end up with prosecutors
dressing up suspects as the Hamburglar, and asking witnesses
to pick the criminal out of the lineup. The whole idea seemed
shaky, to say the least.

The
lineup idea was made even more controversial by the delicate
legal gymnastics needed to justify it. Whether or not it actually
intended to do so, the prosecution, led by District Attorney
Frank Clark and Assistant DA Joe Marusak, could not say that
it wanted to make Kopp up to look like the witness descriptions
of the person seen outside Dr. Slepian's house in the days
before the shooting. That would be prejudicial on its face,
so to speak. And the idea of making him up to look like his
pictures and mugshots from previous arrests seemed equally
ridiculous. That concept reminded me of the old Joseph Heller
joke from We Bombed in New Haven:

General
to Lieutenant: We're going to bomb them right off the map.

Lieutenant:
Why don't we just bomb the map?

If
you're making him up to look like a picture, why not just
show the picture? And in general the whole idea of having
a lineup after four years of intense press coverage of the
case, coverage that had the infamous mugshots of Kopp on front
pages and on national television about once every five minutes
or so, seems ridiculous; it would appear an easy matter for
a defense attorney to argue on appeal that the witnesses would
not have been able to not know instantly which of the bearded
men in the lineup was James Kopp, suspect.

But
all of these were abstract legal questions that attorneys
on both sides would doubtless argue over for years to come.
The questions that came to our minds when we heard about the
lineup were more immediate and concrete: Where the hell does
an Erie County prosecutor go to find a fake beard? and On
a scale of one to ten, exactly how outrageously funny-looking
will Kopp's beard be when they finally wheel it out for the
lineup?

The
range of possibilities was intriguing to consider. Independent
of each other, Slidell and I had both immediately focused
on the preposterous prop used by Woody Allen in the movie
Bananas, in which the Allen character fleeces the entire world,
including the analytical department of the CIA, by sporting
a three-dollar costume store fake beard as he assumes the
identity of a Latin American dictator. We both imagined Kopp
in the guise of Allen's Fielding Mellish character, nervously
blowing the fake mustache strands off of his lips as he warmed
up the United Nations crowd with a joke before a speech: "As
I stand here before you today, I am reminded of the farmer
who had incestuous relations with his daughter..."

There
was also the Abe Lincoln model, an option that seemed too
absurd to consider but would later prove not too far off the
mark...

Law
enforcement and clever disguise have always been contradictions
in terms. There is no creature on earth less qualified to
avoid the pitfalls of unintentional comedy than a middle-aged
policeman or prosecutor grappling with the nuances of wigs
and makeup. In all of literature there is perhaps no funnier
passage than the section of G. Gordon Liddy's autobiography,
Will, in which Liddy describes the "disguises" he and fellow White
House henchman Howard Hunt used before their break-in into
the office of Lewis Fielding, the psychiatrist for Pentagon
Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg.

Liddy
and Hunt contrived to wear polyester lounge clothes and special
braces on their feet that would make them appear to be walking
with limps. Apparently this disguise in the garb of handicapped
Floridan tourists would make them less conspicuous as they
went about their business of burglarizing a California physician's
office at night.

Liddy
and Hunt were the best and the brightest in the American security
apparatus at the time. If that was what White House first-teamers
will come up with in the area of appearance alteration, one
can only imagine what an Erie County prosecutor will do when
faced with the assignment of finding a fake beard. Unless
someone stepped in to save the day, we thought, it was only
a matter of time before someone caught Frank Clark roaming
the aisles of a Spencer Gift store, rummaging for beards under
a pile of magic 8-balls.

We
at the BEAST were curious to see how desperate the situation
was at the DA's office. So we decided one afternoon last week
to put in an exploratory phone call to Marusak, the prosecutor
in charge of trying the Kopp case. As it turned out, affairs
in their office were in such chaos that what started out as
a simple phone gag, spurred by mere curiosity, ended in one
of the more surreal episodes in our journalistic careers--with
the District Attorney offering us, in a formal face-to-face
interview, the job of making up the face of James Kopp.

In
our initial phone call, we decided to just throw a few things
against the wall, just to see what would stick. As is becoming
increasingly evident, walls are very sticky in this town when
it comes to pranks. Posing as "Aaron Wolfsheim," a vacationing
Hollywood makeup artist, I spoke first to a switchboard operator,
then to attorney Jeff Hagen, and finally to Marusak, to whom
I cordially offered my services:

Marusak:
Joe Marusak.

BEAST:
Hello, Mr. Marusak?

Marusak:
Yes?

BEAST:
Hi, my name is Aaron Wolfsheim. I'm a makeup artist.

Marusak:
Okay!

BEAST:
I'm actually a Buffalo native, but I work in Los Angeles.

Marusak:
Uh-huh.

BEAST:
I've done a lot of work in movies. I worked on Planet of
the Apes. I don't know if you saw the recent movie, but
I did Helena Bonham Carter's makeup.

Marusak:
[skeptically] Okay...

BEAST:
And I'm home visiting relatives, and I was reading about
this Kopp trial. And I was wondering if you'd found someone
to do the makeup for the lineup, and if you'd be interested
in seeing some of my work.

Marusak:
Yeah! I would! In fact, it's ironic that you called, because
we're in the process right now of trying to, uh, use someone.
I had someone that I used on a criminal case, oh, God, it
must have been ten years ago. And the telephone numbers
that I have for her are no longer valid, so...

BEAST:
So you haven't found anybody, huh?

Marusak:
So we struck out there.

A
decade of Law and Order episodes had not prepared me for the
reality of a District Attorney who stops at dialing an old
telephone number when searching for someone who is not hiding.
It seemed to me that any adult American male over the age
of twenty who has ever been so hard up for sex that he's been
forced to look up an old girlfriend would know how to proceed
past the "old telephone number no longer works" problem. Momentarily
unnerved, I pressed on:

Marusak:
We're in the process of looking, so yeah, I would definitely
like to see something, uh, that you've done.

BEAST:
Well, if you just want something for a preliminary look,
you can see some of the movies that I've done. I was in
Splash 3, I did all of the costumes for that...

There
never was a Splash 3. Marusak was unfazed:

Marusak:
Uh-huh!

BEAST:
And, like I said, I did Planet of the Apes, I did Helena
Bonham Carter... and, uh [scrambling to think], I worked
for Dino Di Laurentis for many years.

Marusak:
[impressed] Oh!

BEAST:
So I'm just home for a couple of weeks...

Marusak:
Oh, perfect!

BEAST:
I could come by any time.

Marusak:
Do you have your materials with you?

BEAST:
Yeah, I have a kit. I'm working on some models while I'm
here.

Marusak:
Okay!

Genuinely
freaked out by this point, I decided, in a panic almost, to
throw something else out there:

BEAST:
There might be some things that I'm missing, but... I'm
good. I'm so good, if I did you, they'd pick you out of
the lineup.

Marusak:
[again impressed] Wowwwww!

BEAST:
[laughing] So when would be a good time for me to come by?

Marusak:
Well, how about... well, let's see. Let's take a peek about
my calendar... Today is the 23rd. How is Thursday, the 25th?

BEAST:
Sounds good.

Marusak:
What's good for you?

BEAST:
How about sometime after noon?

Marusak:
Okay. Let's shoot for two o'clock.

BEAST:
Okay.

As
soon as this phone call was over (Marusak spent an inordinate
amount of time giving me directions not only to his office
building, but from the elevator on his floor to his office),
I hung up the phone and sat for a moment in stunned silence.
There seemed to be no question that I actually had to go in
to Marusak's office for the interview. God's vengeance is
unerring when such rare opportunities as these are squandered.
Little as I liked the idea of waltzing into the District Attorney's
office to pull this kind of stunt, I knew there was no way
out.

But
what would I do if he actually offered me the job? That was
a trickier question, but after a heated discussion in the
BEAST offices, we settled on a plan for that, too. In the
meantime, we had a serious task before us: we had less than
48 hours to turn me into a plausible candidate for a job in
a million-dollar, internationally celebrated criminal trial.

One
of the ironic things about this story is that within about
twenty minutes after our call to Marusak, we at the BEAST
managed to track down a qualified professional makeup artist,
with a degree in industrial design that included training
in makeup and effects, who was willing to teach us the ropes
of fake beard application. This was clearly the first order
of business. If I was going to go in to the DA's office and
interview for the Kopp makeup job, I needed to sound like
I knew what I was talking about.

It
seemed impossible that a bunch of slackers running a two-bit
humor newspaper would be able to instantly find the right
guy for the job right here in Buffalo, when a mighty state
apparatus with an unlimited budget couldn't manage to find
anyone, anywhere, qualified or not, in any length of time.
But this was apparently the case.

While
I met with the Expert for my beard tutorial, our designers
set to work making up the necessary props for Aaron Wolfsheim's
resume. Pressed for time, we focused on the essentials. Any
reputable special effects artist, we knew, would want first
and foremost to be able to show a picture of himself on the
cover of Fangoria magazine, that blood-spattered Bible of
the effects industry. We dug up an old back issue at Queen
City Bookstore that featured a mangled latex head from the
movie F/X; our nymphomaniac trailer-trash designer Velma Stark
scanned it in, adding in one corner a doctored photo that
featured my face on the body of an effects artist with a truly
spectacular early-90s mullet. The picture could not possibly
have been more ridiculous, but there was no question of not
trying to use it. Underneath the photo, we added the dramatic
headline: AARON WOLFSHEIM BREAKS THE MOLD.

Next
step: the obligatory photo of a slightly older Aaron Wolfsheim
with his arm around Robert Englund, a.k.a. Freddie Krueger.
The original photo we found featured Englund with his arms
around a man in his late thirties who had the awful haircut
and hideously unhealthy body of a top-flight Hollywood cosmetic
artist. I posed for a picture that imitated the expression
on the man's face, looking in mock fright down and to my right
at Englund's famous razor-bladed fingers resting on my shoulder.
Velma morphed that picture onto the original, and there I
was, sporting a prominent set of middle-aged man-titties and
standing with my arms around Freddie Krueger.

We
made a few other pictures, including an 8x11 still of Helena
Bonham-Carter in ape costume, which I was going to point to
as my "crowning achievement" (I also planned to drop hints
that I'd had an affair with the actress, but, sadly, the opportunity
never arose). Then we drew up a set of campy business cards
with a Planet of the Apes theme (Aaron worked for a company
called "Modern Prosthetics" that specialized in "Meeting the
economic prosthetic, mask, makeup, realistic recreation and
effects needs of the motion picture, film, video and theater
industries"), and set to work sketching out a believable biography
for Mssr. Wolfsheim. Among other things, I planned to have
him take credit for building the Sasquatch costume from a
Carlsberg commercial from the early nineties, one which "didn't
get a lot of airplay" but was "well-received by people in
the business."

I
got a good night's sleep the night before the meeting. Then,
in the morning, I met Velma to gather up the sight gags before
retiring to our offices in the luxurious Statler Towers to
get mentally prepared.

On
the way out the door just before two, I realized I'd made
a serious error. The previous evening, one of our other designers,
who'd been in charge of making the business cards, had called
me to ask what telephone number to put under Aaron's name.

"Put
Artvoice's number on there," I'd said reflexively, not even
thinking.

"Done,"
he'd said.

Now
I had a stack of those cards in hand and I realized that they
all bore numbers with 716 area codes--which didn't exactly
fit the profile of a Los Angeles-based effects artist. In
a panic, I took a pen and frantically crossed out all of the
716's as I walked across Niagara Square, replacing them all
with the more appropriate 323 area code.

Confidence
momentarily rattled, I walked into the DA's office at 25 Delaware,
passed through the metal detector, and headed for the third
floor. I needed to take a leak, but I was afraid to ask anyone
where the bathroom was. I was sure that the fraud was written
on my face so clearly that the first word out of my mouth
would get me shot with a Taser gun and dragged into custody.
But I wasn't able to stall for long before a short bald man
in shirtsleeves and a tie caught me meandering in the third-floor
hallway.

"Can
I help you?" he asked.

"Yes,"
I said. "I'm looking for Joe Marusak."

"And
you are?" he asked.

"Aaron
Wolfsheim," I said. "I'm a makeup artist... I have an appointment."

Hagen
led me to a rest room, right up to the door. For a moment
I thought he was going to come in with me. But he backed away
at the last moment, then waited in the hallway... When I came
out a moment later, he led me into his office for what I quickly
gathered would be some kind of pre-interview.

"Joe's
on the phone," he explained. "In the meantime, I'll just need
to ask you a few questions."

Hagen
pulled out a fresh yellow legal pad and glared at me with
a blank expression.

"So
what's your connection to Buffalo, Aaron?" he said, not smiling.

It
took me about two seconds to grasp the perilous dynamics of
the situation. On the phone, Hagen's boss, Marusak, sounded
exactly like what one would expect a grandstanding trial prosecutor
would sound like: comically bombastic in tone, megalomaniacal,
none too bright, and consumed with a fairly narrow range of
predictably vulgar political ambitions, a man who, in all
likelihood, owns four sharp suits and a carefully-attended
anchorman haircut. Behind every such man in this world there
is a less photogenic man who is usefully paranoid and is the
real brains of the operation. This was the person who was
interrogating me now.

I
volleyed back each of his questions with my lame preconceived
answers: I was born in the Buffalo area, but moved to Massachusetts
as a small child. After retirement, my father had moved back
to the city and settled in Allentown, where I was now staying
for a two-week visit. I gave him an address and a telephone
number, the former bogus, the latter belonging to co-editor
Kevin McElwee's mobile account.

"Do
you have a business card?" he asked, still not smiling.

I
handed him my card. "You'll see the area code is crossed out..."
I began.

"Why?"
he asked.

"They
added a new area code in LA," I said. "My number used to be...
in the 213 area."

Hagen
examined it, then put it aside before sitting up straight
to face me.

"You
understand the reason I'm asking you all of these questions,"
he said. "You know the nature of this case?"

"Yes,"
I said. "But only what I read in the papers."

"Well,
you see, the thing is, you know, there are some people who
might want to create a provocation," he said. "And you know,
you called us, we didn't call you. So obviously we have to
check..."

"Obviously,"
I said. "I understand, this is a sensitive case...you have
to be wary."

Hagen
flipped closed the legal pad. A chilling idea which had occurred
vaguely to me at the start of the meeting now rose violently
to the surface of my thoughts. If Hagen did not join in during
the meeting with Marusak, would he excuse himself to start
conducting his background check right away? One phone call
to the fictitious number on my business card, and I was dead
meat. Again the visions: Marusak's door bursting open, more
Taser guns, dogs, carpet burns, the exposed out-of-shape journalist
clutching wildly at a desk leg as he is dragged off...

Hagen
and I walked into the office next door, and he closed the
door behind us. He wasn't going anywhere; I was safe.

Behind
the desk sat a dazed-looking man with an anchorman haircut,
who even when sitting, appeared to be standing with his hands
on his hips.

"Aaron
Wolfsheim," I said.

"Joe
Marusak," he answered.

There's
never been any question in my mind that life is stranger than
fiction. That's why I got into journalism. The material is
so much more challenging.

In
my pre-interview, Hagen had, by way of asking me how long
the process of applying a fake beard would take, given me
a hint as to their earlier progress in wrestling with the
whole beard issue. He showed me a fax some out-of-town outfit
had sent him that included rough diagrams of various beard
shapes. The fax was grainy and nearly illegible; the "beards"
looked like Rorschach tests.

"We
understand this is sort of a drawn-out process," he'd said.
"These other people we're talking to were saying that what
you do is take an Abe Lincoln beard, and cut it down..."

The
image of James Kopp, right-wing nut case, standing in a lineup
with an Abe Lincoln beard nearly felled me from my chair.
I recovered myself in time to affect a convincing sneer of
professional disdain and begin to explain the actual process
of making a professional-caliber fake beard. Hagen had sat
quietly, taking notes.

Now,
in the meeting with both attorneys, I entered into my speech
again. Marusak, a fit-looking man with a vague and unfortunate
resemblance to character actor Fred Ward, sat at his desk
in a pose eerily reminiscent of the classic reverse cutaway
shot used in TV journalism--the one where the TV journalist
is shown sitting with his hands folded on his lap, nodding
seriously as he listens to his interview subject. Those shots
are sometimes done after the fact, but this one was happening
in real time.

Amazingly,
my nervous astonishment in looking at him suddenly translated
into an impassioned and utterly believable imitation of a
Hollywood effects pro.

"No
professional would ever just stick on an actual fake beard,"
I said. "A realistic beard is applied hair by hair. For a
short beard, the process is fairly simple. You apply spirit
gum to the face. Then you take a human-hair wig that matches
the color you want, and cut the hairs into small strips. You
take those strips and you roll them up lengthwise and wrap
them in a little blanket, so that you end up with something
that looks like a little cigar, or... sushi."

"Sushi,"
repeated Marusak.

"Then
you take the sushi and you dab it onto the subject's face,"
I continued. "The hairs will tend to stick to the gum straight
out. Once you've finished applying the hairs to the whole
face, you comb it in the shape that you want, and you've got
your beard."

"I
see," Marusak said, sounding not all that interested in the
particulars. "Well, he has a short bear-..."

"For
a long beard," I said, ignoring him. I was in a zone."The
process is more complex. You take this stuff called slush
latex and you apply it to the face, so that you have a sort
of thin rubber coating. Then, with a needle, you apply each
individual hair strand by strand, sticking it into the latex.
The process takes a long time. When you're finished, you pull
each of the hairs slightly, so that they come out of the latex
a little. The effect is to make it more realistic, because
those little tugs will leave tiny indentations in the latex
that look like pores."

"How
long will this take?" Marusak said, showing me a picture of
Kopp. "He had a fairly short beard..."

I
didn't have the faintest fucking idea. "About two hours,"
I said confidently. "If you're looking at something shorter,
like in that other picture, about an hour and a half." I paused,
coming to the important question. "Do you want me to do just
him, or everybody?"

Marusak
shrugged. "Nah, they're bellyaching about us just doing one
person, you know, like it'll be obvious if there's just one
guy in a fake beard..."

No
kidding, I thought.

"...so
we're thinking we're going to have at least one other clean-shaven
person in the lineup who get s a fake beard, maybe two, I
don't know. Can you do that?"

"No
problem," I said.

Going
in to the interview, I was extremely curious to find out exactly
how they wanted Kopp made up. Was he supposed to be given
the beard that he would have been wearing on the day in question?
That would be tough to do, since no one knows what kind of
beard he was wearing that day; there are no photos, no witnesses
who saw him. (Witnesses saw someone in a car outside Slepian's
home in the days leading up to the shooting, but none of them
knew for sure that it was James Kopp). He might not have been
wearing a beard at all, for all anyone knows.

If
not exactly that beard, then, which one? Over the course of
his life, Kopp wore beards of different lengths and hues.
The mugshots of him show sharply various facial hair arrangements.
Would they just pick one or the other? And if they did, choosing
randomly, on the basis of nothing at all, how could that conceivably
correspond to what he might have looked like on the day of
the murder?

Marusak
showed me a pair of old Kopp photos.

"Which
one do you want me to do?" I asked.

Marusak
shrugged. "Probably a combination of both," he said.

I
pointed to a photograph of Kopp wearing what looked to be
a bright orange beard. "Is that a fake beard right there?"
I asked.

"No,"
Marusak said. "His hair color was usually described as reddish-brown...
That's his real hair."

I
shook my head. "The thing is, if I do that beard, it's going
to look like a fake beard, " I said. "Not for any reason except
that his actual beard looked like a fake."

Marusak
paused, then pointed to the photo of Kopp wearing a darker,
more normal-looking beard. "Let's go with that one," he said.

Well,
that settles that, I thought, taking in the depressing thought
that Marusak might have just made me a witness at the trial.
"Okay," he said.

We
talked a little bit more. Very quickly the conversation swung
around to my work. I opened a manila envelope and began handing
Marusak my resume shots.

"This
is me in, er, a less physically fit period of my life, standing
with Robert Englund--you know, Freddie Krueger," I said.

"Oh,
great!" he said.

"I
actually didn't do his face," I explained. "My job, believe
it or not, was the sweater. It looks like an ordinary sweater,
but it has all these moving parts inside."

"Huh!"
he said.

"And
this is me on the cover of Fangoria magazine," I said. "I
had this great haircut back then. That bloody head I designed
was my real career break."

"Nice,"
he said.

"And
this, of course, is Helena Bonham Carter in Planet of the
Apes," I said. "That's what I spent most of last year working
on."

'So,
what's your timetable next week again?" Marusak asked.

Lost
in professional pride, I didn't hear him. "The funny thing
about those masks," I said. "The original Planet of the Apes
masks were just masks. You stuck them on the face and that
was it. But these new ones we designed are completely animatronic.
There are little electronic parts in every section of the
face. You move your upper lip, the upper lip moves."

"That's...
interesting," he said unconvincingly.

They
asked me again about my schedule. It was clear I had the job.
I told them that there was an outside chance that I'd have
to be called back to L.A. immediately to do a project, but
that, barring that, I was free to do it early the next week.
Hagen told me that "we're happy to have someone with your
qualifications."

"I
hope we can all work together," Marusak said.

"I
think it will all work out," I said, eyeing the exit.

We
all shook hands and I left-- in a hurry.

Don't
get me wrong. I hate those anti-abortion maniacs as much as
anybody. As far as I'm concerned, if Kopp is guilty, he ought
to be shot into space. And I think that every church in America
ought to donate a million dollars apiece to Dr. Slepian's
family, so that even his great-grandchildren will never have
to work a day in their lives. Jesus Christ! Shooting a doctor
in the name of God! What's wrong with these people?

But
what if the suspect wasn't an asshole like Kopp? What if it's
you or me in a drug case? You put a bunch of people like this
in charge of the lineup, and who isn't going to pick out the
suspect? Left to their own devices, Kopp would be standing
there in an Abe Lincoln beard!

And
even if the guy is guilty, trotting him out there like that
seems like far from a public service. Any sane appeals court
judge might take one look at the transcript, decide the witnesses
have been tainted, and throw out the whole case. Next thing
you know, some abortion doctor in Pittsburgh is getting shot
in his backyard next to his Hibachi. The whole thing is so
nuts, it's almost hard to laugh about it.

A
few hours after my interview, I called Hagen. He wasn't in.
I left a message on his machine, explaining that I was being
called away to Baton Rouge, to shoot a movie called Crawslaught
(about mutant crawfish run amok) and would be unable to do
the lineup.

Five
minutes later, Hagen called Kevin's cell phone number. The
latter explained that he didn't know any Aaron Wolfsheim.
He called back, apparently in the hope that he'd dialed wrong.
Same deal. They apparently didn't look very hard after that.
Let's hope they don't read the BEAST...